Friday, September 4, 2015

In the past 2.5 years I've spent most of my time on fundamental metadata issues that made the streaming experience (for classical and other music) often not as pleasant as it should be. We are still not there yet, and I'm aware of the issues that still bother classical fans: long track title readability, especially on mobile; no composer column (though composer is displayed as first artist at track level for classical content); search could be lacking for aficionados and overwhelming for classical newbies. They are not forgotten. It just takes more time to fix 30m tracks delivered by tens of thousands of labels in different formats (and constantly updated), than fixing a personal music library.

From now on I will also spend some spare time on playlisting. Hope you enjoy the first effort. Suggestions and comments are welcome.

There's still so much to improve, but the below 50 composer pages are already great starting points for people who want to get into classical music or explore a bit more. Comparing to these changes, all the playlists I've done before are really nothing.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

For those of you who already followed my Harmonia Mundi - hmGold Series playlist, it might take a while before the composers appear in the desktop client. In web player everyone should see the composers now.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Thanks everyone for updating the 2011, 2012 and 2013 New Classical Releases Indices. Let's do it again in 2014 and hopefully next year you won't have to use a playlist to browse the newly recorded/released classical albums of the year.

Same rules as before:

1. One track per album. You can click album titles and browse full albums.

2. Add new tracks at the top of the playlist, so the new additions can be found easily.

3. Please avoid duplicated entries. Use the filter bar to check before adding. For example: before you add Daniel Barenboim – New Year's Concert 2014 / Neujahrskonzert 2014, you can press Ctrl (CMD) + F to bring out the filter bar, input partial title (like Barenboim or new year's concert) to check if the album has already been added.

4. Only add newly recorded albums. No re-issues, re-packages or compilations of previously released material.

Friday, January 10, 2014

I assembled this playlist of 401 Zappa tracks that, for me, represent his best and most accessible musical compositions (omitting tracks where I find the musical quality is secondary to comedy bits or commentary):
Frank Zappa's Musical Evolution (401 tracks, 19 hours).

To provide a sense of the progression of Zappa’s musical ideas and development, I have arranged the tracks in chronological order, based on when they were first recorded or performed, rather than by release date, with help from the discography and timelines in this site: http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/index.html.

I have grouped together alternative recordings of the same piece, in chronological order, always beginning with the first instance of a piece, followed by alternate recordings of that piece, and then followed by guitar solos from that piece, also in chronological order of performance. This groups recordings of guitar solos (which Zappa often released at later times, as separate pieces, with different names) with the piece in which they were originally performed.

Suggestions to improve it are welcome: kris at globalweb.org.

A little info about me: I became a Zappa fan in 1969, at the age of 13, when I was turned on to the "We're Only In It For The Money" album by my Boy Scout troopmaster. Two years later, I went to my first Zappa concert, when the band included Flo and Eddie and Ian Underwood. Listening to Zappa helped open my mind to exploring a wide range of music, especially jazz. I saw Zappa in concert once more, in 1974, fronting one of his best bands that included Napoleon Murphy Brock, Ruth Underwood, George Duke and Don Preston on keyboards, the Fowler brothers (Bruce, Walt, and Tom on trombone, trumpet, and bass, respectively), Jeff Simmons on guitar, and Ralph Humphrey and Chester Thompson on drums.

Thanks Kris, I look forward to listening to more Zappa using this playlist.

To all the Zappa fans: you can also check out my Zappa as Composer playlist, and follow the revamped Frank Zappa artist page (all albums have the correct original release year now, instead of the 2012 remaster year like in all other music services), so you will get notifications when the Zappa Family Trust makes his posthumous catalog available digitally.

About Me

Maybe everything that can be done HAS been done.
Maybe we are at a crossroads where art has exhausted itself as an imitation of life.
Maybe it is time, therefore, to allow life to become an imitation of art.
The art is in the living within our personal relationships: to reach out and touch another human soul as the great masters have touched us all.

If you want to share your playlist or just say hello, leave a comment or send me an email by clicking the image above. Thanks.

Greetings from the blogger

Hi everybody,

I am Chinese, 26 years old, have been listening to classical music for 6 years. I'm not a musician but work in the music industry, though one of my favourite quotes is Ives' "the birth of art will take place at the moment in which the last man, who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever."

In the beginning I saw the film Amadeus and was awed, then I began to build my collection started from Naxos' Mozart piano concertos. On my 20th birthday I got Bernstein's Mahler cycle with NYPO on Sony. Since then Mahler's nostalgia for a lost or never existed homeworld always moves me, you know that China is still going through the pain of a quick-paced modernization and I feel that things are changing so fast that it is almost impossible to identify myself with anything. Not many great classical concerts here in Beijing, last year I was lucky enough to attend Abbado's Mahler 4th and it will always be a very precious memory.

Recently I started to use the instant online streaming music service Spotify, it has a huge classical library, but it seems that very few people listen to classical on it. There are many Spotify playlist sharing sites, and many of them don't even have a classical section. So I started my own blog.

Besides the playlists I post, when I mention artists or recordings in the posts, most of the time I will link them to their Spotify ablums, so you can click through if you are interested.

I look forward to exchanging playlists and thoughts on classical music and other arts with you.